Air travel has been affected by a global disruption of IT services. Photo: ExclusiveAccess.Net / Shutterstock Editorial
Services began to recover on Friday evening after an IT failure caused serious issues worldwide. Experts say full recovery could take weeks. Airports, medical services, and many businesses were affected by the “biggest outage in history,” reports The Guardian.
Flights and hospital appointments were canceled, payroll systems failed, and TV stations went off the air after a faulty software update impacted Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The issue was caused by an update from American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, leading to the “blue screen of death” as computers failed to boot. Experts say each affected computer may require manual repair, but some services began to recover by Friday evening.
The outage highlighted concerns over many organizations’ preparedness for contingency plans when critical IT systems fail. Experts note that such failures will recur until more contingency plans and better backup systems are implemented.
In the UK, Whitehall crisis officials coordinated the response through the Cobra committee. Ministers contacted their sectors to mitigate the IT failure’s effects, and Transport Minister Louise Haigh said she was working “in step with the industry” after trains and flights were affected.
“We are aware of an issue affecting Windows devices due to a third-party software platform update. We expect a solution imminently,” Microsoft said on Friday.
CrowdStrike confirmed the failure was due to a software update, not a cyberattack. Founder and CEO George Kurtz expressed regret over the impact on clients, adding that there was a “negative interaction” between the update and Microsoft’s operating system.
CrowdStrike’s stock price plummeted during the day, dropping by 13% at some points.
Tesla owner Elon Musk stated that the failure caused a “traffic jam in the automotive supply chain,” while banks in Kenya and Ukraine reported issues with their digital services, and supermarkets in Australia faced payment problems. Flights from Otopeni Airport were also affected.
According to service status monitoring site Downdetector, UK users reported issues with Visa, BT, major supermarket chains, banks, online gaming platforms, and media services.
Sky News and CBBC were temporarily off the air in the UK, and Australia’s ABC was also affected.
In financial services, Metro Bank reported issues with phone lines in the UK, and Santander noted potential card payment impacts. Monzo mentioned some clients reported issues, while some JP Morgan bankers couldn’t access their systems, and the London Stock Exchange reported problems with its news service.
Troy Hunt, a leading cybersecurity consultant, said the scale of the IT failure was unprecedented. “I don’t think it’s too early to say: this will be the biggest IT failure in history,” he wrote on Twitter. “This is essentially what we all worried about with Y2K, except this time it actually happened,” he added, referring to the Y2K bug that concerned IT experts at the turn of the millennium but ultimately did not cause significant damage.
Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, noted that fixing the issue requires manual rebooting of affected computers and that “most ordinary users don’t know how to follow instructions.” Organizations with thousands of computers spread across multiple locations face a more complex task, he added.
